The Greater Yellowstone Coalition, Natural Resources Defense Council, Sierra Club, and Defenders of Wildlife filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Boise Sept. 12 to block the J.R. Simplot Co.’s expansion of its Smoky Canyon Mine in the Caribou-Targhee National Forest near the Idaho/Wyoming border.
Represented by Earthjustice, the coalition of environmental groups argues the U.S. Forest Service acted arbitrarily when it approved Simplot’s expansion plans in June. It also points to past phosphate mining pollution problems, including toxic selenium contaminating waterways, that helped the area earn Superfund status in the 1990s. The groups disagree with the Forest Service’s decision to clear the way for mining across more than 1,100 acres of roadless forest.
The lawsuit names as defendants federal agencies and top administrators, including Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne, Bureau of Land Management Director Jim Caswell, and Caribou-Targhee National Forest Supervisor Lawrence Timchak. Deputy Regional Forester Cathy Beaty recently said Timchak complied with applicable laws and regulations in his decision to approve the expansion.
Smoky Canyon and 17 former mines scattered along the edge of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem continue to pose an environmental threat to clean water, fish, and wildlife, the coalition says.
Simplot officials say the Smoky Canyon Mine expansion is critical to keeping its fertilizer plant near Pocatello operating through 2025. It announced five years ago its hopes of extending operations to the south, pushing into federal wilderness land.
Simplot, Monsanto, and Agrium have mined areas in Southeast Idaho for decades for their regional phosphate plants. Monsanto’s proposed new Blackfoot Bridge mine, near Soda Springs, is also under federal review.
For the past two years, Idaho has been working with the Forest Service on a rule to manage the state’s 9.3 million acres of roadless land. The most recent version of that plan removes the Smoky Canyon expansion acreage from protected roadless status, a conflict the groups also are challenging in the lawsuit. The lawsuit disputes the Bush administration’s June authorization of the mine’s expansion, which was approved by the Forest Service and the BLM on assurances by Simplot that additional selenium contamination will be effectively contained.
On Sept. 18, Simplot said it had filed a motion to intervene so as to oppose the lawsuit. Simplot said the mine, which is located along the Idaho-Wyoming border in Caribou County, has been in continuous operation since 1984. It said there are two remaining panels, or sections, to be mined at Smoky Canyon, which are estimated to provide another 15 years of phosphate ore to the company’s fertilizer plant in Pocatello. The mine is the only source of ore for the Pocatello plant, and current mining operations will keep the plant supplied for approximately two more years.
Phosphate ore is transported from the mine to the plant via an 87-mile buried slurry pipeline. Approximately 210 employees work at the mine, and another 350 work at the Pocatello facility.
Bill Whitacre, president of Simplot’s AgriBusiness Group, says the agencies’ decision to approve the mine’s next phase came after five years of study, decisions, appeals, and public comment. “Tens of thousands of public comments have been submitted at different stages of this five-year permit process,” Whitacre said. “The agencies have reviewed each comment, held it up to their own scientific review process, and have approved the plan we submitted.”
According to Whitacre, the unusually lengthy decision and approval process was important to ensure exhaustive review and public involvement, but has left the mine dangerously low of remaining ore to supply the Pocatello plant, and has put 560 highly-skilled employees at risk.
“Unless this approval is upheld, we will put immediate contingency plans in place to curtail production, resulting in a loss of production, a loss of jobs, and the ultimate closure of both the mine and the plant,” he said.
Whitacre estimates it will take well over a year to build the roads and power lines and remove the overburden before phosphate ore can be shipped from the two new approved panels.
Simplot notes that the approval decisions from both the U.S. Forest Service (USFS) and Bureau of Land Management (BLM) came after a very technically rigorous examination of mining practices and environmental impacts from the proposed project. This included state-of-the-art scientific studies, collections of thousands of pieces of data, and the utilization of latest science to determine the best mining engineering methods available. Simplot said when the BLM issued the final Environmental Impact Statement in October of 2007, their announcement stated that mining and reclamation practices are held to an extremely high standard, and Simplot’s “Smoky Canyon will be a trendsetter.”
An economic impact study conducted by Idaho Economics, an economic research firm in Boise, Idaho, concluded that if the phosphate mine and fertilizer plant were to close, it would have a combined economic impact of $131 million per year across 11 counties in Eastern Idaho and Lincoln County, Wyoming. The two facilities have a large impact on three Idaho counties and one in Wyoming. While the mine is located in Idaho’s Caribou County, most workers live in Lincoln County, Wyo. The fertilizer plant is located in Power County, but most workers live in Bannock County. The buried pipeline between the two facilities passes through all three of the Idaho counties.
The study also concluded that in addition to the 560 jobs in jeopardy from closing the mine and plant, the phosphate operation creates another 1,066 jobs in the region and over $6.3 million in Idaho tax revenue.
According to Whitacre, the local economic impact of closing the mine would be staggering, as well as the impact on Western U.S. agriculture.
“We are all suffering with the higher food prices stemming from the global food crisis” he stated. “The food shortage has created an unprecedented need for fertilizer products around the world, particularly here in the Western U.S., which is one of the most fertile and productive regions in the world.”
The Smoky Canyon Mine produces enough ore to manufacture over a million tons of various fertilizer products, which are distributed in every state west of the Mississippi river.
Whitacre predicts that if fertilizer products from Simplot’s operations are suddenly removed from the market, it will have a significant impact on Western U.S. agriculture. “It would create an additional hardship for family farms who are already struggling at today’s costs for fertilizer, fuel and seed,” he said.
Simplot has been in the phosphate business in the region since the 1940’s, when J.R. Simplot experimented with crude phosphate from bat and bird guano from Pacific islands. The company said he was surprised how phosphate improved the quality and yield of crops, particularly potatoes. He built a small fertilizer plant in Pocatello with the promise that phosphate rock would be provided by a company from Montana. When that fell through he found phosphate reserves in Southeast Idaho, and developed Idaho’s first open pit mine on the Shoshone-Bannock Indian reservation 25 miles north of Pocatello. That mine supplied ore to both Simplot and FMC until it was closed in 1990 and mining operations shifted to the Smoky Canyon mine.